


Inter Lineas

by sciencefictioness



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Possession, Sibling Incest, Suicidal Thoughts, Trans Gerard Keay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-10
Updated: 2020-09-10
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:09:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,278
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26385424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sciencefictioness/pseuds/sciencefictioness
Summary: His earliest memory is the creeping sensation of being watched.Then it is his mother, and her books.  Gerard, sitting on the floor surrounded by stacks of them, learning Robert Smirke’s Fourteen the way other children learned their letters.The world was full of horrors, and he would know them all by heart.
Relationships: Danny Stoker/Tim Stoker, Gerard Keay/Tim Stoker
Comments: 5
Kudos: 32





	Inter Lineas

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DryDreams](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DryDreams/gifts).



> Happy birthday Parker, I love you!

His earliest memory is the creeping sensation of being watched.

Then it is his mother, and her books. Gerard, sitting on the floor surrounded by stacks of them, learning Robert Smirke’s Fourteen the way other children learned their letters. 

The world was full of horrors, and he would know them all by heart. 

His mother, and her books, and the Eye. It is a blessing until it is a curse, but it doesn’t matter. Once he has beheld something there was no going back. He chases books the way others chase drugs, or sex, or violence, and they consume him just the same. Gerard stumbles through underground tunnels, running from things that swallow men whole.

Gerard crawls away from what is left of his mother, covered in blood and shaking. He sits in a coffee shop, vacant, staring at the walls.

Gerard sits in prison surrounded by metal and concrete. It is the closest thing to freedom he’s ever felt. It isn’t something he can keep. 

Gerard gets out and his mother is there again, haunting him worse than any ghost. Even in death she will not give him peace. Gerard does as she asks, except when she fades away, and he tears it all apart again. Gertrude sets him free. From Mary, at least.

Some things, there is no escaping. Gerard tattoos eyes onto his hands, and it feels like surrender. 

Gerard tattoos an eye over his heart, and it feels like falling to his knees.

When he deals with Diego Molina the fire is agony, but the physical pain isn’t the worst part. His skin crawls, and his eyes ache. The Desolation eating his suffering feels like blood draining from his body; Gerard’s misery does not belong to it. 

He plunges a scalpel into Molina’s throat and takes it back. Watches him turn to ash. Gertrude is not much better than his mother, but Gerard doesn’t know how to do anything else. He follows her all around the world. They burn books. Slaughter avatars. In the end it is not the fire or the darkness or the unknown that takes him. Not the flesh, or the ire of pages he reads and turns but cannot understand.

It is his own body betraying him, quickly enough that there is nothing but a decline so rapid it is staggering. It is Gerard in a hospital, shoving paper cups full of pain medicine away, sweating through the hurt. Dying is like breathing for the first time in his life. There is no one watching. 

Gerard doesn’t have eyes, and it is rapturous.

It isn’t something he can keep.

She pulls him back again. Puts him into the book. He is glad his mother isn’t there, but that doesn’t make it easier to settle. It is like being stitched back into existence with clumsy, rusty needles. There is Gertrude’s voice chanting. She says she is sorry, but she isn’t sorry enough to stop. All the things she’s done, all the people she’s lost, and she cannot let him go. Gerard is nothing but pain.

Gerard is cut apart and sewn back into the world. Gerard is pressed down into ink and agony. He has no body and yet all of him hurts. He had no lungs, yet he suffocates. There are eyes, of course. They are not his own.

He lives through his death again when someone reads his words. Being summoned is like stretching, except his bones want to break. She calls him out once to apologize.

All the eyes in all the world and Gerard cannot cry.

Gertrude brings him home and tucks him away in the archive. Somewhere safe, she says, as though that is true of anywhere on earth. As though anyone can be safe anywhere. Then she leaves him behind. Artifact storage, because he is not a person anymore. He is a memory of a person. Some  _ thing,  _ instead of someone. Gerard thinks of fire.

It is not like sleep. Sometimes it is close, like he has pushed himself to the edges of exhaustion and is barely holding onto awareness. There is a heaviness laid over him. It is the closest thing to rest he feels anymore.

Sometimes his skin crawls and all of him writhes. 

Gerard is made of nothing, but sometimes he still shakes.

Artifact storage is quieter than being dragged across the world. It is mostly empty, and the people who come there rarely dwell. Gerard cannot see them, but he  _ knows  _ them. There are the researchers who mill around, passing by the shelf he sits on as they take a book or a chair or a piece of clothing to run their reckless tests. There are people who work in acquisitions, struggling to find a safe place for some atrocity or other. 

There is the Archivist. Or, the person who will become the Archivist, anyway. Right now he is a weak and fragile thing, cradled inside the Institute like a flower that cannot stand against the wind. The Archivist rarely comes down. When he does, the anxiety in him is a buzzing thing in what would have been Gerard’s jaw and he vibrates with the need to calm him.

More often than the Archivist, there are the archival assistants. One of them is already halfway into the Lonely, the solitude on him like a shroud. The other powers do love to tempt fate when it comes to the Beholding, as if it does not see. As if it does not  _ know.  _ Gerry could not recognize them quite so easily in life, but now it is all but written on them. 

There is one who feels like the ghost of the Stranger is haunting him. It is not a mark. It is a  _ scar.  _ Someone has been cut out of his life and he did not come out unscathed. He drifts through artifact storage more and more, fury clinging like a second skin. He staggers down the halls. Lingers in the corners.

He opens Gerard’s box. Runs his fingers over Gerard’s book. It isn’t a caress. 

Gerard doesn’t shiver. There are so many pages; Gerard doesn’t know why he settles on his own. Doesn’t know why he reads the words when surely he knows better. 

Gerard has learned what happens when one reads from strange books.

The way they read you in return.

The way they won’t let go.

It has been ages since he was summoned; he has not seen Gertrude in so long. Or maybe not. It feels like years, but every moment in the catalogue feels like an eternity. The agony of his death rises up, forces itself into all the places where his bones and blood and teeth are not. It is brief.

It is unending. Gerard is made of pain.

Then it is over, and he can almost breathe.

Gerard spills into existence like smoke. He is blue-gray, a transparent apparition, not-quite-solid from the head down, blurring more until his calves and feet are nothing but a twist of fog. They tie him to the book, like a djinn to a lamp, tethering him in place. The way he forgets just how good it feels to exist again is deliberate.

There is no point in yearning to be someone when he is not anymore.

From what he and Gertrude had gathered, the appearance of someone summoned from the book is mostly determined by their own image of themselves. He has tried again and again to picture himself without his burn scars, but every time he pours into being, they are there again. Not that it matters anymore. He is made of ink. He does not own any skin, save that his words are written into.

He is no different than any other book; a resource to be used.

An answer to a question.

The archival assistant is staring, wide eyed with his mouth open.

“Oh, fuck  _ off.” _

There isn’t as much fear as Gerard expects. The man looks to be somewhere in his thirties, short dark hair and a strong jaw. Tall with wide shoulders but still lean. Big hands, dark eyes. Boring, maybe, but pretty. The most interesting thing about him is his scars, dotting his face and throat and hands. 

His scars and the anger behind his irises and he is something beautiful. Gerard hasn’t seen a man for hundreds of pages, at least, and he isn’t going to complain.

He reaches out as though to slam the book closed, and Gerard lifts his hands up.

“Wait wait stop! Don’t close it!”

The man’s fingers are already on the edges of the book. Gerard sighs, pleading.

“Dismiss me, at least. When you just close it like that it— it hurts.”

He pulls his hand back like he’s been burned, looking Gerard up and down with furrowed brows.

“You’re… hell, you’re Gerard Keay, aren’t you?”

Gerard resists the impulse to look down at himself, huffing a soft laugh.

“Sure. Reputation precedes me and all that, I suppose? You don’t seem to have intended to have me out for a chat. Who’re you, then?”

The man blinks, backing up slowly until he runs into a desk, sitting carefully on top of it.

“I’m- I- Tim. Stoker, I- I work in the archives. You- I mean. You’re… how did you…”

Gerard laughs. 

“Trouble with working for Archivists, isn’t it? Either you die right off or you can’t stay dead.”

Tim frowns, looking incredulous.

“Are you telling me that  _ Gertrude  _ put you in there?” 

He sounds strangely horrified considering he doesn’t know Gerard, doesn’t know what he’s been through, can’t possibly understand.

“Pretty much. She didn’t— she didn’t kill me, if that’s what you mean. Brain tumor snuck up on me, ‘case that page wasn’t clear enough for you. Couldn’t just leave well enough alone, I guess. I died, and then she brought me back and put me in here.”

Tim is just staring, taking all of this with the grace of someone who has already seen too much and is more tired than surprised.

“Why would she do that?”

He sounds forlorn. Sounds mournful. Like the thought of having death stolen from him is a horrifying thing. He knows, Gerard realizes. Knows that death can be a blessing.

Something to reach for, instead of something to run from.

“I dunno,” Gerard says. Lies. “Thought she was doing me a favor? Couldn’t let go, maybe? Certainly didn’t spend long languishing over it. Shoved me down here and carried on like nothing happened. She’s gone, isn’t she? Gertrude.”

Part of Gerard wants to be wrong. He cared about Gertrude, even if he couldn’t trust her. Gerard doesn’t know if he’s capable of trust. 

Part of Gerard wants to be right. It has been so long. He wants to think she wouldn’t just leave him like this, alone and in agony. Useless, but still kneeling.

One more watchful eye.

Tim huffs a laugh, but there is no joy in it.

“Yeah. Yeah, she- she’s dead. Been gone a while now.”

Gerard nods. Runs a tongue he does not have over teeth that are not there.

“Sounds about right.” The silence is heavy, and he knows somehow that Tim will not fill it. “So, who’s your Archivist now? You’ve got the Stranger on you, ‘s that a battle scar from stopping the Unknowing?”

Tim goes pale and shocked and furious. After a moment he sucks at his teeth and laughs again, a dark sound.

“No. No, that’s from something else entirely.  _ Jon’s _ head archivist now. We’re still trying to figure that out. Stopping the Unknowing and all. Your Gertrude hasn’t made it easy on us, and Jon seems content to follow in her footsteps. Make everything  _ difficult.”  _

Gerard hums.

“They are good at that. Archivists.” He looks Tim up and down again, considering. “Since you aren’t here to use me like some sort of Beholding manual and I’m feeling charitable, a bit of advice. The Unknowing can’t be stopped, exactly, but it can be interrupted. Gertrude figured it out. Had a storage building on an industrial estate up near Hainault under the name Jane Kelly. Whatever she thought might disrupt the ritual,  _ that’s  _ where it will be.”

Tim blinks a few times, eyes roving and looking at nothing in particular before he nods.

“Alright. I’ll pass that along. Thanks, I guess. Is there ah… anything I can do? For you?”

He’s looking at Gerard skeptically, like he isn’t sure what that would be but is willing to try. Gerard looks at Tim, grinning.

“I’d kill for a cigarette but I don’t suppose that’s going to work out for me.” Tim laughs back.

“Could light one up and blow the smoke through you, see if it helps.”

Gerard laughs back, looking down at his hands. At the perfect, unblemished eyes set amidst his scars. When he touches them there is resistance but no sensation. He takes up space without existing.

Exists without taking up space. Gertrude is gone and no one else even knows he’s here. Elias maybe, but Gerard has his doubts. Eyes do have trouble seeing one another when they are set in the same skull, after all. He presses at the ring that isn’t in his lip with a tongue he doesn’t have. Brushes phantom strands of hair away from his face.

“You could burn me,” Gerard says, softly like someone could overhear and stop them. “Dunno how tied you are to the Beholding, but it should only hurt for a moment.” 

Tim breathes in deep. Lets it out in a sigh. 

“You… sure about that? That it’s what you want?”

Gerard nods, trying not to look desperate when he glances back at Tim.

“Tear out my page, take it home with you, and burn it.”

Tim takes another deep breath and seems to be considering it. Gerard expects him to hesitate— they might have more questions for him if they are trying to stop the Unknowing, or any of the other rituals. They might need information, or maybe Tim wants to ask permission first. He doubts the Archivist will be willing to sacrifice knowledge so easily.

Except he steps forward, up to the place on the shelf where he’d left the book. Eases his hand into the smoke of Gerard where he coils against the pages. Gerard feels it.

_ Feels  _ it. Tries not to feel it as Tim runs his fingers over the letters of him. The words, and ink, and agony.

“You said it might hurt me. Is it going to… hurt you? The… the tearing, the burning?” 

Tim isn’t worried about stealing from the Eye.

Tim is worried about  _ hurting  _ him. Gerard laughs. Lays his hand over Tim’s on the book. Drags his fingers down, feels the way he slides through him.

“It will hurt less than this,” he says.

Tim huffs another dark laugh. Gerard can feel the grief in it. The scars the Stranger left on him swell and seethe.

“Yeah, alright. Know what that’s like. Do you want me to… summon you again? Before I do it?”

Gerard hums. Shakes his head.

“No. Just wait until you’re home, and make sure it’s done right. Don’t leave me half singed in a fireplace or something.”

Tim nods, resolved, laying one hand flat on the book and taking Gerard’s page in his other hand.

“Alright. Brace yourself, I suppose?”

  
Gerard closes his eyes, but he can still see.

“Yeah. Just do it.”

It is like Gerard is made of seams; they are being torn apart, and yet he is still whole. It does not hurt more than all the rest, but it is starker, sharper. A knife instead of a flame. The noise he makes is wounded and he cannot hold it back. 

Then it is over, the wispy smoke now bound to the page in Tim’s hand, and already he feels more free.

“Sorry,” Tim says, looking down at the page with something like uncertainty.

“Don’t be,” Gerard says, shaking his head. “Doing me a favor, aren’t you? There are worse things than dying.”

Tim looks lost.

Tim  _ understands. _

“Right. Well… Sometimes there’s nothing to say I guess. I’m headed home soon. I… I dismiss you, Gerard Keay.”

Gerard vanishes back into ink and nothingness and it is a little less miserable than before, knowing it will come to an end soon.

-

It is warmer, softer, safer, folded up into a square and tucked into the pocket of Tim’s jacket. There are no smells, no sounds, no sensation. There is simply the knowledge of being protected, until he can stop being anything at all. The sense of the passage of time is vague and, in his experience, unreliable. It feels like longer than a handful of hours when every moment is an eternity.

Gerard can tell when they leave the Institute, though. When the Eye is less heavy on him; something peering at him through binoculars instead of pressing him between thin layers of glass under the lens of a microscope. Watching, instead of  _ possessing.  _

Gerard is tired of being  _ owned. _

He doesn’t know when they get to Tim’s house, exactly, but he does feel warm fingers running over the words of his page. Feels something apologetic; maybe it is words. Maybe it is not. 

There is impossible heat, and he is burning, burning, burning. It is nothing he has not experienced before; Gerard has felt the Desolation already, again and again. It has always had a taste for him. He supposes it’s only fair that it gets to claim him in the end.

Then, there is Tim, breathing. Tim, drawing Gerard into his lungs. Tim, and Gerard is in his blood and his bones and his skin and there is no pain but he can feel Tim shaking. Can feel Tim gasping, wide eyed, clawing at his chest where his heart is beating like it might get away from him, somehow. 

Gerard is inside Tim’s thoughts, and memories, and everything he is and was and will ever be is slipping between Gerard’s fingers and warm on Gerard’s tongue and silky on his lips and Gerard  _ is  _ Tim and Tim is Gerard and they will never be anything but one another ever again. When an entity takes someone, it usually leaves nothing behind; Gerard had expected an ending.

He had not expected  _ this. _

“You… you lied to me, you… you said…”

Gerard shakes his head. Gerard doesn’t have a body but Tim  _ feels  _ it. Gerard feels Tim feel it. Feels him understand.

_ No, no no no! I didn’t lie! I didn’t  _ know,  _ I swear to you! I thought… I just wanted everything to stop.  _

Tim laughs, forlorn. He is on his hands and knees, trying to stop the world from spinning as Gerard flows through him like blood.

_ You know what that is like,  _ he thinks forlornly before he can pull back the words.

He doesn’t mean to be sifting through Tim’s memories; he simply knows them, the way Tim knows them. The way Tim would know Gerard’s own if only he could breathe. There are his parents, gone when he is so young that they might as well not have existed at all except for the hole they left behind. There is his youth, his schooling, his career.

There is Danny, and Danny, and Danny. Danny is his brother.

Danny is more. Tim fights with every ounce of his will to keep this one thing buried, but the more he tries to hide it away, the easier it is for Gerard to see. It isn’t deliberate. It is just the Eye in him.

The Eye in them both, peeling back skin and muscle and bearing witness to things that were meant to stay in the dark. Danny is his brother.

Danny is everything.

Danny is in his bed in the dark in their aunt’s house. Their grandmother, their uncle. Whatever relative they’ve been shuffled off to, everyone trying not to say what they are thinking; that this shouldn’t be their burden to bear. That they don’t have the space, the time, the money. That they are waiting for the two of them to be old enough so they can forget they exist at all.

Danny is in his bed in the dark, covers pulled up around them, lips pressed together.

_ Shh,  _ Danny says, his hands in Tim’s clothes, in Tim’s hair.  _ They’ll hear you,  _ he says, kissing the noise out of Tim’s mouth. They are too old to be sharing a bed.

They are too young for this. 

All they have is each other, and it is all they need. A dozen different beds, different rooms, different houses. They are teenagers. They are in college.

They are grown, and they try to pretend they do not need it anymore, but they always come back to each other. Tim is ashamed. Danny is not.

Tim feels like a monster; Danny tells him it is a lie, and Tim pretends to believe him, and they fall into one another again and again and again. Danny’s cunt is tight around Tim’s fingers, around his cock. Wet against his tongue. Danny is warm and safe and always his, no matter who else has them.

Danny is crying in his room in the eerie moonlight, shaking his head.

Danny is flayed alive on stage by the Stranger. 

Danny is gone, gone, gone, and Tim is in agony. Tim remembers Danny, tangled in his sheets.

Tim remembers Danny, made of stitches and gore. Tim wants to die.

Tim wants to burn as much of the world as he can to the ground, and then he wants to burn with it.

Tim is on the floor with tears tracking silently down his cheeks. Gerard feels vile, like he has taken something precious without consent. Like it is he, and not the Eye, who has pinned back Tim’s ribs to watch his heart flutter and resist the urge to give way. Tim is breathing heavily, laying on his side with his clothes rumpled, fingers hanging loose. He is covered in sweat, staring out at nothing.

He has been preyed upon.  _ Fed  _ from. Gerard did that to him.

Gerard doesn’t know how to stop.

_ I am so sorry. I didn't mean to see, but you shouldn’t be ashamed. It’s alright,  _ Gerard thinks. Tim doesn’t shake his head, but Gerard can feel the motion anyway. He is right, and he is wrong. Nothing is okay. Nothing will  _ be  _ okay.

_ You loved him. There is nothing wrong with all the ways you loved him. He had you, and you had him, and there is nothing wrong with that. _

It isn’t a lie. Even in Tim’s memories, clouded by want and grief, he can tell there was nothing dark about the way he loved his brother except the way it made him feel when he let the world press in on them both. They were all alone.

There was nothing else.

Gerard opens, as best he can. Shows Tim all the worst parts of himself in offering. His mother, and his mother, and his mother. The things he’s done to people in service of the Eye. What he became, before he became nothing but ink on a page in a book of the dead. The way he just let it all happen, let entropy drag him forward down a path that had only the most brutal of ends waiting. How he could have escaped and did not try until it was too late. If anyone here is a monster, it is not Tim.

It is  _ Gerard.  _

_ I didn’t know,  _ he says again. Lets Tim feel the honesty of it. Lets him  _ see.  _ Gerard was never an Archivist, but he belonged to the Eye just the same, and that power is still there. In Tim now, waiting.

_ I’m so sorry. _

He is sorry, but there is no pain anymore. No sharp edges pressing at him, stitching Gerard into something he never should have been. No weight pressing down on lungs he doesn’t have, cutting off air he has not breathed in years. 

Gerard does not allow himself to dwell on the shape of Tim’s body. The way it is all the things he craved in life before he settled and accepted there were things he could not have. There is Tim, and he is warm, and open, and alive. There is Tim, and he is full of pain, and bitterness, and fury.

There is Tim, and he covers his face in his hands and tries to breathe through it all. Chokes on a sob.

He lays there on the floor shaking with his tears. He thinks of Danny.

He curls around himself and does nothing at all for a long, long time. Gerard is sorry, and it means nothing.

Gerard understands, and that means nothing, too.

-

He makes himself small. As small as he can be when he is always there, filling up all the empty space in Tim, living in his bones. Tim picks himself up off the floor and stumbles to the kitchen, body sore from laying on the ground so long. There are dishes in the sink. Trash piled high in one corner, overflowing the bin. Fruit rotting in a bowl on the table. Gerard knows what the detritus of loss and depression and apathy looks like, even if it’s been a while.

There is a bottle of whiskey on the counter, and Tim opens it and drinks. Drinks, and drinks, and drinks, until he has to stop because there is no more air in his lungs. It’s cheap and sharp and warm and he takes a ragged breath and lifts it to his lips again. The world starts to go soft at the edges. Gerard wonders if he is blurring his vision out of spite for the Eye, or Gerard.

Tim staggers to his bedroom, lays down in bed, and lets the haze draw him down into sleep. Gerard watches his dreams. He dreams of the archives. Dreams of Sasha. Knows it’s not Sasha, really.

He dreams of Danny. 

He wakes up, and for a moment he forgets Gerard is there. It is breathtaking to be in a body again. To feel it moving, even if he isn’t the one in control. To  _ exist,  _ even if it isn’t the oblivion he’d been reaching for; it is better than oblivion. 

It is this euphoria that has Tim flinching in realization. He is not alone.

He will never be alone again.

Gerard pushes his apologies forward.  _ I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I wish I could take it back.  _ Tim just shakes his head.

“Stop,” he says, out loud, waving his hand through the air. “I- I believe you, alright. There are worse things that could have happened, it’s just… going to take some getting used to, right?”

Tim heads into the bathroom to start his morning routine, and when he steps into the shower, Gerard can feel himself trembling through Tim like he could fall apart. Tim hesitates, pausing with his hands halfway to his hair, brows drawn.

“Everything uh… alright? In there?”

He does not have to speak aloud for Gerard to hear him, but it is endearing somehow. 

Gerard flows into Tim in a way he has not before, filling up his arms and hands and fingers and tentatively taking control.

_ Can I?  _ Gerard asks. Something in Tim balks, but Gerard is not above begging.  _ Please,  _ he says. Lets it shake through Tim, shamelessly desperate. It has been so long since he felt anything like this, and he is not too proud to beg.

“Knock yourself out,” Tim says, and Gerard flows through him like a sigh.

It is ecstasy to move. To scrub Tim’s fingers through his hair. To feel warm skin under his hands. To learn the scars he bears, feel their stories run through Tim’s mind like prayers. Where he fell off his bike. A dog bite. A cut he got climbing a fence. 

The Corruption. Deep pits. Ragged holes that go deeper than flesh and bone. Holes that twist down into Tim. That refuse to heal. There are more scars.

Some of them belong to Danny. Gerard lingers over those, unable to stop the rush of images that come with the more innocuous memories. Danny throwing a punch and splitting his lip. Danny and Tim drunk together falling down some stairs. Danny’s fingers under his clothes and Danny’s teeth in his neck and Danny, and Danny, and Danny…

Gerard has wrapped a fist around Tim before he can stop himself, lashes fluttering closed at the feeling. It is so much, all at once.

It is nothing like when he was alive, pressing his fingers into his cunt. Hating the way he was shaped, at first. Then hating the world, instead. To have this, feel it in his hand… Gerard has lungs but cannot breathe.

All he can do is feel.

Then he pulls back, clenching his hand into a fist with his other palm in the air, fingers splayed wide.

“Sorry,” Gerard says, out loud, not giving himself time to revel in the novelty of  _ speaking.  _ “Sorry, I didn’t think!”

Tim is still tangled in all his best, worst memories.

_ Don’t stop,  _ Tim thinks, and oh,  _ oh. _

It has been a long, long time since he’s let himself have this; since he’s done this for himself, and not for the Institute.

Since he’s thought of Danny, and gotten lost.

Gerard gets lost, too. Learns about Tim’s brother.

Learns about Tim. He presses his forehead into the tile and feels the water pouring over him. He bites his fist and works himself and falls apart. Tim’s jaw shakes and his muscles tense and he is so dizzy he feels like he might collapse. It is impossible to hold onto control.

Gerard slides into the background of Tim’s thoughts again, shivery and overwhelmed.

_ Thank you,  _ he thinks, so earnest it should be embarrassing.

Tim laughs once, sharp and derisive.

“No problem, Gerard. Rifle through the skeletons in my closet any old time, yeah?”

There is bite to the words, but Gerard can feel the amusement underneath them. 

_ Think we’re close enough now that you can call me Gerry. _

Tim laughs again. This time, it curls warm through his chest.

“Gerry, then.”

They shower and get dressed and if Tim wears all black and doesn’t quite know why, neither of them bring it up.

-

Tim takes a leave of absence. A week or two, he says. Get his head on straight. Elias doesn’t argue. Jon isn’t thrilled, but Tim isn’t sure he’s ever been thrilled about anything. Gerard eats and drinks and runs and listens to music that has Tim wincing and screams as loud as he can just because he has lungs again.

Gerard is alive.

Gerard is  _ alive,  _ and Tim cannot help but relax into the joy of it. It starts raining and Gerard walks outside into it, wearing Tim’s skin, tears running down his face as they’re soaked to the bone.

Gerard runs his palms over Tim’s body and curls his fingers around his cock and sinks into him. Tim drinks it up like rain on dry earth. Gerard presses into him and scratches down his stomach, toes curling against Tim’s sheets. There are no secrets. There are no walls.

Tim can breathe, and so can Gerry,

It should not be easy, and yet.

-

The Institute is the same.

Tim is different.

_ Oh,  _ Gerard thinks as he sifts through Tim’s memory. As he reaches out and Knows things, as best he can. 

_ We’ve got our work cut out for us, darling. _

There is something watching.

Tim is watching back.

**Author's Note:**

> Tell me nice things, here or on twitter @scifictioness


End file.
